Wednesday, February 28, 2007

lab 70 - dict

NAME

lab 70 - dict

NOTES

I ported Plan 9's dict to Inferno.
At the moment it works with the Project Gutenberg dictionary and Roget's Thesaurus. Of course, since I'm an acme fan,
I also ported adict to browse the dictionaries in acme.

I've been looking to collect plain text databases that would fill a small portable 60GB drive. Then use acme as a plain text browser. When I've thought about Inferno as a system I've paid too much attention to the code and not to the data it might work on. Collecting databases is an attempt to broaden my view.

Two databases to start with are Wikipedia (8GB uncompressed not including images) and the whole of Project Gutenberg (4GB compressed). I've started working on getting a local copy of wikipedia to display in acme using dict.
I got this working for a small
subset of wikipedia, the first 1GB, just to try things out. It works well enough that I'm now working on the complete archive.